Mentoring

Those Dummies books can be really useful when you just need to know enough to keepa conversation going, have questions you’re embarrassed to ask, or when arudimentary level of knowledge is adequate. Building a Website for Dummies, HomeMaintenance for Dummies, Wine for Dummies — I get those. I had a hoot of a time at aconference I spoke at once in Reno, betting craps with a woman who’d studied Crapsfor Dummies on her plane ride from Colorado Springs. We kept our strategy to thechapters she’d read, and our money lasted the evening!

A number of years back, I was invited to contribute a favorite exercise I used withstudents to a version of Poetry for Dummies. The lure was that all the cool poets wereparticipating. If I added an exercise –– ta da! –– I’d be cool, too.

Since usually I don’t feel half-smart enough to be a poet (and since the magic wandpath to coolness was tempting, but suspect), I declined the request. It did get me tothinking, though, about the difference between reading a How To book and having ateacher. Or, being really lucky, and having a mentor: someone who feels a commitmentto your success and hangs in with you beyond obligation, sharing the nuances, thecontradictions, the life surrounding the skills. I had the good fortune both in learningpoetry and as an apprentice electrician, to be taken on by brilliant mentors. DeniseLevertov and Stanley Plathe had a lot in common. I’m not sure I’d have become a poetor electrician without them.

I was an audit student of Denise’s when she taught at Tufts University in the mid-1970s.But before she allowed me to join the class, she interviewed me in her living room aboutthree poems I’d submitted to her. Why had I broken the line here, not there? Why had Iused a period rather than a semi-colon? Why had I chosen the verb “to hump” thatconnoted a particular image-system rather than other more fitting choices? With agrowing sense of panic, my answer to each question was the same: blank, a shrug. Itwasn’t that I hadn’t revised the poems, but that the choices were all from instinct and mytraining in logical prose. I was certain I had failed the interview. Fortunately, as it turnedout, Denise’s questions were not for entry but more the Course Description, or firstlesson, that every word, punctuation mark, white space had to be a thoughtful anddeliberate choice.

I have a similar memory of Stanley handing me a motor switch and asking me to figureout how to wire it. I was only a second year apprentice, and hadn’t learned that yet. Butit helped me see where I was reaching, and that he expected me to get there. Later thatyear, Stanley was out sick for a few days, and left me in charge of the job. The owner ofthe shop nearly had a heart attack when he stopped by, and saw the girl apprenticetalking over blueprints with the general contractor. Stanley was unfazed.

With Denise, the classroom time where we workshopped poems and discussed thepoetics of writing in open form, was just the baseline. She taught what it meant to be apoet in the world by bringing me to hear writers, Grace Paley and the Iranian poet, RezaBaraheni; by being blunt when she thought my writing was not progressing; and bychallenging my life choices that she found mistaken. It wasn’t an easy relationship.At the start of my electrical apprenticeship, my first foreman was a vicious man whotried to frighten me out of the trades, and boasted that he’d done that with a Chinese-American apprentice. When that shop laid me off, I was relieved, but another badexperience would have ended my career, I’m sure. But I landed with Stanley, who’d alsohad a run-in with that first foreman, and we bonded immediately. He’d grown up on afarm in Minnesota, and saw no limitations to the work women could do capably. Ibecame “Stanley’s girl”. He showed me how to lay out the work of a big project so thatthe job made money without too much stress, hanging fixture chain months in advancewhen access was easy or laying pipes in the floor for the inevitable ‘extra’ requiredwhen the architect’s error was discovered. When there was a particularly hard or dirtyjob to be done, and the owner offered to “get a guy from the hall” to do it, Stanley wouldrespond, “I’m a guy from the hall” and he and I would do it.

Both Denise and Stanley taught me to calibrate. To select a word not just for meaning,but connotation and musicality. To set a screw with the right torque: not over, not under.Really learning to be a capable artist or skilled tradesperson takes dedication,perseverance, curiosity, and willingness to reinvent. To find the courage and selfconfidencerequired for that long journey filled with setbacks and dead ends, it’s atremendous help to have someone who’s far ahead reach back: not only to assist andguide you, but to believe in you until you are able to believe in yourself.